04.30.09

Summary: Another closer look at the issue of Microsoft intersection with US politics

Microsoft is already close to the Democratic Party [1, 2, 3]. It smoothly realigned itself after the parties had swapped positions*. Some days ago we saw Obama putting a FOSS-hostile person from Microsoft inside the Technology Advisory Panel and now we are seeing this:

Does experience at Microsoft make for a good politician?

State Rep. Ross Hunter, a former Microsoft general manager, announced today that he’s running for King County Executive, competing against four other candidates for the position. He’s one of many former Microsofties now in the political arena — and he’s pointing to his experience at the Redmond company as a major selling point

There are other examples of Microsoft people in the US government. And this is why — as the title already stated — the United States is likely to be last to migrate to Free software. █
______* Not as a matter of rule, to the best of my understanding, the United States virtually relies on one big party (the business party) which comprises two separate factions (blue and red, just like the flag). The party rallies the two sides at the same time and funds them handsomely to take turns and run PR campaigns with prospective leaders serving as icons, brands/slogans, or even mere symbols, whose role more of less resembles that of the Queen of England. A lot of the impact comes from behind the leadership, so while the two sides do take turn (illusion of choice), votes never receive a real opportunity to elect decision-makers. Information as seen on TV (also owned by big business) assures that a barrier is installed before those who challenge the status quo of this unbalanced system.

Summary: Activists have their computers intruded by predatory multinationals

The Mad Hatter has just informed us that “there’s an article in the Financial Times about the French Nuclear Energy operator EDF spying on Greenpeace, through use of a Trojan. If they [had] been running anything other than Windows, the Trojan wouldn’t have worked.” From this article:

EDF, France’s nuclear energy operator, paid investigators to infiltrate the anti-nuclear movement around Europe, according to testimony given in a French judicial investigation.

The investigation is looking into whether the state-controlled group condoned illegal practices as part of a surveillance operation.

The affair has exposed an underworld of computer hackers and private investigators who claim to have worked for some of the world’s most respected companies. It also raises questions over the methods employed to ensure the safety of nuclear operations in France and abroad.

US ‘should go on cyber-offensive’

A US Air Force officer has told the BBC that his country should create an offensive botnet to target any forces that launch a cyber-attack against it.

In simple terms, the US Air Force is prepared to hijack its own citizens’ Windows PCs for “good cause”. See references [22] and [23] in this post for details about other plans of the United States government to physically bomb sources of cyber-attacks (e.g. suspected botmasters). This has developed like some sort of a Hollywood movie plot; it’s no conspiracy of course, it’s verifiably true. It’s talked about openly. █

“It is no exaggeration to say that the national security is also implicated by the efforts of hackers to break into computing networks. Computers, including many running Windows operating systems, are used throughout the United States Department of Defense and by the armed forces of the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere.”

IF YOU HAVEN’T been stuck in a cave lately, you will undoubtedly have heard that Windows Vista SP2.1, aka Windows 7, will have an ‘XP mode’. Before you jump up and down for joy, you should know that it won’t do what you think it will, it is a scam.

Microsoft is conducting a very carefully crafted PR campaign to make Windows 7 seem less broken than the Broken OS (Vista / Me II), but it isn’t. It gives long lead previews to people it knows will kiss up and not criticize the OS in order to create ‘good buzz’. Sadly, with regard to Microsoft’s Windows 7, the PC industry press is abdicating its responsibility to report objectively about a vendor’s product, and the public is, well, dumb as rocks. It will believe almost anything it’s told and never question the source. Yes, I am talking about you.

[...]

Why is this important? Well, the main difference between AMD-V and VT is that AMD-V is able to virtualize memory access in a much more transparent way. When AMD-V based VMs look to memory, they take a few cycles hit, but VT VMs get hammered by having to do a bunch of translations on the memory addresses. The speed difference is quite extreme, and it is why AMD had a huge advantage in VMM deployments for several years. With Nehalem, Intel has caught up.

Neither however is able to virtualize peripherals, and the prospects of doing so are fairly dim. If either side puts that capability into the CPU and chipset, you will also have to wait for peripheral makers to get up to speed. On the high-end enterprise side, things like multi-port NICs will probably get there first, but consumer widgets won’t see it for a long time.

[...]

Windows 7 will grab the GPU to run the desktop, and it can’t share the device. If it were even possible, you could possibly assign the GPU to XPM, but that would mean you’d lose GPU acceleration for the desktop, CPU use would spike, and things would start to resemble molasses in the winter very quickly. This much brain twisting logic is unlikely to be implemented even if it could somehow technically work. Basically, the host OS, Windows 7, can and must own the GPU fully.

[...]

So, what you will get with XPM is not an XP machine but a bloated resource hog that emulates the worst of 2004. Slowly. It may be a good fit for green screen COBOL apps that won’t run on the Broken OS, but that is about it, and you will pay for the ‘privilege’ in terms of resources used and speed of operation.

We won’t get into the funniest parts (yet), but think about this, Microsoft is claiming that XPM will be able to interact with Windows 7 apps seamlessly. I don’t doubt that it will be appear seamless to the user, but there will have to be some pretty horrendous low level OS contortions going on under the surface to make it work.

The news that people will not be able to run applications designed for XP on Windows 7 by tapping virtualization, as XP Mode supports, is discouraging for cash-strapped consumers and small businesses that hoped to upgrade without ditching existing hardware or upgrading their software.

Microsoft Corp.’s decision to give some Windows 7 users a tool to run Windows XP applications in a virtual machine may have been necessary to convince people to upgrade, but it could create support nightmares, analysts said today.

If the EU Commission actually decides to investigate this*, then it should also take a careful look at Microsoft’s anti-Linux dumping in Russia and in Turkey. To pay people to suffocate the competition is the same type of felony that — as shared just moments ago — Intel will need to pay $1.3 billion in fines for (in Europe alone). █
_____* The Commission appears to have neglected and eventually turned a blind eye to the OOXML crimes.

In Linux For Absolute Beginners: 3 Easy Ways to Test-Drive Linux I reviewed some simple ways to safely test-drive Linux. All of them involved selecting a Linux distribution to try, then downloading and burning it to a CD. Anyone can learn how to install Linux in different ways, such as dual-booting, standalone on a single PC, or in a virtual machine. While installing Linux is very easy as far as installing operating systems goes, it still requires a bit of geekery. If anything goes wrong it can eat up a lot of time troubleshooting, especially when you’re not familiar with Linux.

In this episode: Ubuntu 9.04 is here and Renai LeMay says it’s as slick as Mac OS X. We also get to play with the GP2X Wiz portable games console and ponder on the announcement that Oracle is going to buy Sun Microsystems. Our open ballot asks whether we should dump OpenOffice.org.

Assuming your system is equipped with up-to-date antivirus software, and that you’ve conducted a full system scan, you can get a second opinion by turning to one of my favorite diagnostic tools, Ultimate Boot CD.

This is basically a distribution of Linux that you can burn to a CD. Assuming your system is configured to boot from a CD (if not, you can try these suggestions), it will allow you to boot up into another operating system environment that lets you run a slew of diagnostic checks on the underlying hard drive and operating system, including virus scans from at least three different anti-malware vendors. It is generally safe to delete any suspect files found in these scans, but the scans themselves can take many hours to complete, depending on how many files you have on your system.

Usefulness, however, is not always the primary factor that determines wide-scale adoption. A more accurate determination can be made in terms of absolute cost—especially when adoption is considered in developing countries—as well as relative cost in relation to value. A client’s thinness bears a direct relationship to its cost, because less capable systems are less expensive to produce. Similarly, the cost of cloud-based software is directly related to its large-scale adoption.

Applications

MEDUSA4 Personal is a fully featured advanced drafting system with smart editing and drafting power tools, basic 3D, parametrics, and even a Sheet Metal Design module. It supports Windows as well as six different Linux distributions (CentOS, Fedora, Mandriva, RedHat, SuSE and Ubuntu) .

Games

The Alien Arena development team has released 16 screenshots of the upcoming Alien Arena 2009. This release features “some very significant advances” in the game engine and new arenas, and player models. It’s also mentioned that they are planning to release the new version in June; thanks to jay for the heads up.

Time to boot LiveCD: 55 seconds, Time to install: appox. 25 minutes, Time to HD boot: appox 45 seconds
This is a very strange boot. It seemed to lag in the middle, but it did finish booting with a very nice desktop in the end. I like the way the menu is set up; lately, I’ve found that you have to drill down quite a ways for the menu items in some other XFCE distros, while this one seems to be clean, quick and better organized.

This was your normal average Ubuntu boot/install. But I did something that I regretted later; I tried to skip the language packs during install…a bad move. Luckily, the DM is smart enough to know that certain things were missing, and prompted me to fix things by reinstalling the missing items, and after that, all was well. I really doubted the notification area’s worth when I first read about it, but after that incident, I had a greater appreciation for it’s purpose.

Charles Dickens wrote that “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. I have a feeling that he wasn’t referring to computer operating system boot times, but that’s what I’m going to discuss today. More specifically Ubuntu 9.04′s boot times.

I’ve done this sort of thing before, but luckily somebody else is comparing the Xfce environments of Debian Lenny and Xubuntu/Ubuntu.

Results are not surprising and are in line with what I found over a year ago when I did a major comparison of everything from Xubuntu and Debian to Slackware and gOS, as well as Wolvix and standard Ubuntu.

[...]

In all fairness, I haven’t tried Slackware again since 12.2 came out, so maybe things have changed, and I also haven’t tried Lenny since it went stable (my experience was during the three or so months leading up to that point). Put simply, Ubuntu worked, so I use it.

New Releases

Dedicated to those who like order over chaos, to those who like simplicity over complexity, to those who think that less is more, to those that just want more for less. Sabayon 4.1 will catch you, based on Sabayon 4 LiteMCE, represent what can be the future of our Operating System: just the best of the Out-Of-The-Box, KDE, multimedia applications and nothing more than what you need for your daily tasks, but what about your free time? We’ve got it. XBMC (formerly known as Xbox Media Center) 8.10 is what you’ve ever wanted to build up a fantastic HTPC or Internet Multimedia Box, so what’s better than having it ready to use? Show off the new Sabayon Linux to your friends, they have no more excuses to not try it!

Phones

In these videos 2 employees of Skytone demonstrate the Alpha 680, which is likely to be the first netbook to be shipped with the Android mobile operating system. You get an impression of browsing the Web with a browser based on the WebKit engine, using Skype, and the Palringo instant messaging client on the Alpha 680.

The Pré smartphone could cost just $30 (£20/€23) more to buy that it actually costs Palm to make, according to a report by market analyst iSuppli.

iSuppli forecasts that the phone will sell for roughly $200 (£135/€150) when it eventually comes to market. That’s despite a cost analysis calculating that that each unit will cost Palm $170 in components to produce.

Everyone knows salt’s bad for you in large amounts, but you’ll need a fair sized dose if you’re to swallow the latest Palm Pré rumour. But it’s Register Hardware’s duty to report that a second Pré smartphone’s supposedly in the works.

Sub-notebooks

How far should Microsoft feel threatened by Linux? Quite a bit, if ARM’s CEO Warren East is to be believed.

“Today the Linux world is not as good as Microsoft from the point of view of the user, but it’s getting rapidly better,” East told me this afternoon, “so it will get to be as good as Microsoft and, when that happens, the genie will be out of the bottle. Because Linux is much more cost-effective than Microsoft. People will ask: ‘Why do we use Microsoft?’”

East told the FT recently that ARM “almost doesn’t care” that ARM-based netbooks will not be Windows-based, pointing out that if people find Linux and Android just as good an experience as Windows, then Microsoft’s reluctance to get involved doesn’t matter although “it’s a dangerous missed opportunity for them”.

Today’s ‘default’ netbook, from a name-brand vendor, delivers quasi-desktop functionality, costs as much as that vendor’s (now non-existent) lower-cost notebooks/laptops, ie in the US$500 range, and we have the tier-1 name brand vendors perpetually pushing the price further uphill, introducing pointless feature-creep to justify this price-hike.

[...]

So, how does Linux lose in this market? In short, it doesn’t – the ‘netbook market’ has instead morphed into something else: it’s become the ‘smaller form-factor notebook’ market. And in this market, Microsoft has traditionally held a 95% slice (in the OEM, non-Apple realm).

Therefore, what we have here is not so much a case of Linux losing ground in the netbook market, but of Microsoft and OEM hardware partners reshaping the market into “the same ol’, same ol’”. It has become a market where Microsoft has substantial monopoly market advantages, dating back to 1981, and where it has honed substantial, oft-times illegal anti-competitive market capture machinery.

And yet, even in this market, now reshaped to favour Microsoft’s monopoly machinery, Linux still snared 24% of ‘netbook’ shipments.

People do not like to talk about morality much these days, but that’s exactly the thing at heart here. An Open Source person is using OSS software because it’s generally better and because that policy brings in practical benefits. A Free Software person would use Free Software even if it was worse because, to him, it’s the right thing to do.

Fashion is fickle. One day thin clients and clusters are the fashion de jour, the next it’s Web 2.0, Virtualisation or distributed computing and Grids. They who live by the sword of fashion will surely perish by it but a new model has been strutting its stuff along the catwalk of web fashion and she goes by the name of Cloud Computing. Like all fashions there is a deal of hype surrounding it but there is a consistent concern emerging from all that hype and is about the dangers of proprietary cloud computing. Richard Stallman has called it a “trap”. He is right—but it is more than that. It is a well-baited, DRM-like honey trap for the unwary. That is not immediately obvious. Like all good traps it suckers you in before the wire noose tightens around your neck. You don’t have any wire cutters in your rucksack but you do have the GPL and free software to effect an escape. Can it save us from vendor lock in and proprietary software?

Business

THE BUSINESS: Lucid Imagination Inc. provides commercial services for Apache Lucene and Solr open source software, nonproprietary technologies that are used to create full-text search engines. Apache Lucene/Solr downloads have grown nearly tenfold over the past three years, with a current run-rate of more than 6,000 downloads a day.

SugarCRM, for its part, on Wednesday detailed a new lineup that features Sugar Express, which costs $8 a month per user, Professional for $30 per user per month, and the Enterprise iteration that costs $50 per month for each user.

He notes that a VOIP or IP telephony system can be integrated with core business applications ensuring users have faster, more detailed access to business information on their own business contacts. “These applications can be pushed right down to the handsets themselves, enabling the entire IP telephony network to be customised right through to the endpoints,” says Wortt.

Funding

There are a lot of mixed networks out in the wild, of course. This is why Likewise has successfully secured a $10 million Series C round of funding, which the company plans to use to pursue growth in new markets and fund the development of its product line.

The Miro internet TV player is completely open source, and licensed under the GPL. The content it delivers is free of charge, and the organization backing it (the Participatory Culture Foundation) is a registered non-profit. Developers and contributors are always welcome to donate their time and effort in any capacity they are able.

Those behind the open source Internet video player Miro have launched a new adoption system! No, you won’t be adopting babies or kittens, or even polar bears in Antarctica—instead, users can “adopt” a line of source code from Miro for $4 in order to help support the continued development of the software.

The researchers behind the open source Eucalyptus project have launched a company to commercialize the technology. They plan to offer services and support to companies that want to use Eucalyptus to build self-hosted elastic computing clouds.

The accepted students, their projects, and the mentors are listed on the official Drupal.org announcement. Congratulations to all successful applicants, and thanks to the Drupal Summer of Code organizers, the Drupal mentors, and last but not least, Google. Awesome!

FSF/GNU

GCC 4.4 is a critically important component of the open source software landscape. It officially was released last week and I blogged on it briefly, but felt the need to get more insight. Fedora 11 which hit its preview release yesterday lists GCC 4.4 as one of its key features and Red Hat is a key contributor to GCC, so I asked Red Hat for their views on how GCC 4.4 will make a difference.

Licensing

In the midst of such a situation, a man who advances an argument that the markets can seek efficiency and attain it is talking rubbish. The markets are controlled by human beings. And it is these flawed human beings who decide the direction things take by means of the crooked or straight tactics they use.

Thus, the most efficient system does not win. The system that is willing to bend the rules to its advantage, use its contacts to avoid prosecution and its money to lessen resistance and shape public opinion wins. Let me say just one word here: Microsoft.

If the markets were efficient, then companies like Citibank would have failed. The same goes for AIG, General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford – all companies where the management failed.

My Twitter network points out as I write this that MySQL is open source and under the GPL, so it can’t really be killed; it’s already been spun off in a slimmer form into the open source community, as Drizzle.

E-mail

What is the best way to prevent spam and viruses from entering your inbox? According to its makers, the open source Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy (ASSP) server project takes the honours because of its design and feature set, and best of all it is free and cross-platform.

In the past three months, Funambol’s open source community testing increased 2,000%, open source downloads grew 34% and active servers increased 42%. Funambol’s community continues to enhance the software’s interoperability with many systems, including Google apps, MS Exchange, Android and Mozilla Thunderbird. Furthermore, Funambol’s expansion into mobile social networking has fueled significant developer interest and activity.

The messaging and groupware landscape has altered significantly in the last few years with, like it or loathe it, Microsoft’s Exchange Server now firmly ensconced as the number one solution regardless of customer size or industry sector. There are alternatives, of course, but rival developers have more or less given up on trying to beat Microsoft at (what’s now) it’s own game. Instead most now concentrate their efforts on developing alternative messaging and collaboration servers which to end users, and their applications, look and behave just like the Exchange they’re hoping to replace.

Healthcare

Medsphere SystemsCorporation, the leading provider of open source healthcare IT solutions, todayannounced a five-year contract with Connecticut’s Silver Hill Hospital forimplementation, training and support of the company’s OpenVista electronichealth record (EHR) solution.

But commercial vendors, noting a common complaint against open-source software that is developed by engineers here and there, say that they can provide a more reliable soup-to-nuts system and offer many features that users of the VA system have to tack on, notably billing and financial programs that commercial hospitals need to run their business.

[...]

Many start-up companies adapting VistA for commercial use, including Blue Cliff Inc., MELE Associates Inc., Sequence Managers Software and Medsphere Inc., say their systems will still be less expensive for hospitals to deploy. Medsphere, which put together the system for Midland Hospital, says OpenVistA enables hospitals to run system checks for security problems and bugs. And Chief Executive Mike Doyle says the open-source software community can quickly share information and patches to fix or correct them.

All the recent talk about various polls and elections being pranked or hijacked, serious and silly alike, prompted me to write an article about the technical realities behind online polling, and the political fallout of ever becoming subject to online voting for serious elections

Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, has faced the biggest financial penalties to date, accused of abusing its dominance. It paid a fine in 2004 of 497 million euros, or $663 million at current exchange rates.

In the Intel case, “I’d be surprised if the fine isn’t as high or higher than in the Microsoft case,” said Howard Cartlidge, the head of the European Union and competition group at the law firm Olswang in London. “Technology markets are where the European Commission has perceived particular problems due to dominant companies.”

Some legal experts speculate that Intel’s fine could reach about a billion euros, or $1.3 billion. Intel’s annual sales were $37.6 billion in 2008.

Copyrights

The well-known Swedish author Unni Drougge was so upset by the court verdict against the Pirate Bay that she uploaded a home-made audio book version of her best-selling new novel Boven i Mitt Drama Kallas Kärlek (The villan in my drama is called love) to the site, complete with a manifesto for free file sharing and a link to her Paypal account.

If there were anyone out there to whom you would not want to send a random takedown notice for an online video, it would probably be Larry Lessig. Given that Lessig has become the public face for those who feel that copyright has been stretched too far, as well as being a founder of Stanford’s Fair Use Project, and who’s written multiple books on these issues, you would think (just maybe) that any copyright holder would at least think twice before sending a DMCA takedown on a Larry Lessig presentation.

The original complaint was made by Norwegian browser maker Opera. It accused Microsoft of leveraging its desktop monopoly to distribute the browser and of ignoring web standards. Because of its large market share web developers were encouraged to optimise their sites for IE – to the disadvantage of other browser makers which did follow web standards.

In another news report, it is made publicly known right now that transparency in the EU is seriously deficient. It’s specifically about access to documents.

Being refused access to documents was “by far” the most common allegation made by citizens to the EU Ombudsman last year, revealed a report presented yesterday (27 April).

We have personal and very bitter experience with that, so we’ll present the latest from last week. For the first part of the story, see this long post. It’s about Microsoft attacking Free open source software through European panels. We are still waiting for the Commission to mail us the documents we asked for. It’s taking weeks if not months already and it’s a violation of the regulations.

Thank you for your e-mail of the 20th of March registered on 23rd of March applying for a copy of documents in accordance with Regulation (EC) N° 1049/2001 regarding public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents.

Your application will be dealt with within the prescribed delays. You have requested access to the documents as follows:

“I hereby request electronic access to all documents related to the Towards the European Software Strategy process in the posession of the EU-Commission, in particular access to the following documents:
* the list of participants in the industry expert group
* the list of WGs, WGs sleaders and observing Commission officials
* draft contributions of all industry Working groups on a the European Software Strategy
* draft input to all WG prepared by the Commission
* the participant list of the related meeting on January 20th in Brussels
* all submissions from industry to the ESS consultation under the applicable provisions of regulation 1049/2001 which grant me a right of access to all documents mentioned above.”

However, we are unable to identify the documents refereed to in the fourth item “draft input to all WG prepared by the Commission” and the sixth item “all submissions from industry to the ESS consultation”. Please could you clarify your request so that we may continue to process it.

> > The document you are referring to is not a European Commission document, but a document that are made by Zuck and many others from industry.

is a negative reply upon my 1049/2001 request of access to the document
please consider the specific provisions of the regulation that guide
your obligation in the formal processing of an application under
1049/2001. For instance you have the formal obligation to “inform the
applicant of his or her right to make a confirmatory application in
accordance with paragraph 2 of this Article.” and the statement above is
not in line with the formalities under 1049/2001.

If your statement was such a negative official reply, please regard this
mail as a request for a confirmatory application under 1049/2001 for
access to European Software Strategy documents. The origination of the
document is irrelevant. You have to state reasons for access refusal. I
inform you about the substance of Art 4.4 “As regards third-party
documents, the institution shall consult the third party with a view to
assessing whether an exception in paragraph 1 or 2 is applicable, unless
it is clear that the document shall or shall not be disclosed.”

If you regard it as just an informal preliminary communication please
just process the following clarified primary application.

2. I hereby request electronic access to all documents related to the
Towards the European Software Strategy process in the possession of the
EU-Commission, in particular access to the following documents:
* the list of participants in the industry expert group
* the list of WGs, WGs leaders and observing Commission officials
* draft contributions of all industry Working groups on a the European
Software Strategy
* draft input to all WG prepared by the Commission
* the participant list of the related meeting on January 20^th in Brussels
* all submissions from industry to the ESS consultation under the
applicable provisions of regulation 1049/2001 which grant me a right of
access to all documents mentioned above.”

I appreciate your kind assistance. If you feel that you are unable to
process my request yourself it is your obligation to forward it to the
competent person in the Commission.

********** *END ENCRYPTED or SIGNED PART* **********

Still waiting. It has been over a month and it has been very time consuming. Why can’t the document just be handed over immediately? █